Amikumu is an app where you can look for speakers of a specific language nearby (for example, Ido, Japanese or French) and you’ll see a list of everyone on the app who speaks that language sorted by how far they currently are from you. Then you can contact them and propose to meet up.

I got the idea watching people play Pokémon Go at the International Youth Congress last year in Poland. I thought if you could “catch” cute little monsters, why not “catch” Esperanto speakers. Later I realized this was an app that many diverse language communities could find useful around the world.

Amusingly, a week before, one of Evildea’s YouTube viewers contacted him to tell him that he’ll soon be in his neighborhood if he wants to meet up. They met and the visitor lamented the fact that there are no other Esperanto speakers in Perth. However, Evildea personally knew many of them already and got him in contact. Then he realized many people are in the same situation as his YouTube fan.

While I was at the youth congress I saw Evildea online and asked him what he thought of the app idea. He said that he had the same idea and was planning to approach investors next month to raise funds already! Since we both essentially had the same idea at the same time, we decided that we should work together. But first, we wanted to test the idea with the general public, so we set up a Kickstarter to gauge interest.

The roles came easy: I handled the technical side and he the business. This is actually quite common in such tech startups. For example, Apple had the same type of founders with Steve Jobs taking care of business and Steve Wozniak handling the tech. We sometimes joke that I know enough business to get into trouble and he knows enough tech to get in trouble, so we make a perfect team!

Yes, we’re currently a team of seven: besides Evildea and me, we also have an Android developer in Boston, iPhone developer in New York City, backend developer in Berlin, graphic designer in Russia, and our system administrator in New Jersey.

When the alpha test version of the app was almost ready, we met up in Hamburg, Germany and then attended the Junulara Esperanto-Semajno together nearby. Then on Jan 1, 2017 we launched the alpha version for attendees and around 40 people signed up. Already even without messaging functionality, people already loved it!

Very much so! We put the project on Kickstarter because we weren’t sure if this was just an app we wanted or if there was a general demand for it. In 27 hours, we had already reached our goal of 8,500€ and by the end of the month had finished with over 26,500€ raised. It was incredible to see the community support behind this project!

We currently have the app interface in more than 25 languages (including Ido!). Our volunteers continue to translate it into more languages through the crowdsourcing platform Crowdin. Anyone who wants to help translate Amikumu into any language can find our project at https://crowdin.com/project/amikumu.

Right now our hottest plans are for The Flow. This will be a way to see what the nearest 100 people to you of any language are writing. Since there are only 54 Ido members, that means you’ll essentially see a news feed full of only Ido posts if you want!

We just got our 10,000th member! We now have members in over 130 countries who speak over 400 languages. 54 of our members speak Ido (9 experts, 9 intermediates and 36 beginners). Ido is currently the 37th most spoken language on Amikumu.

They love it! People have been meeting each other all around the globe. I once saw a video from a Brazilian guy in Taiwan who talked about meeting another Amikumu member in the Dubai airport. A lot of Amikumu members travel very frequently.